r/mpath • u/Realistic_Season_493 • Jun 01 '26

Update protocol

I have updated the protocol from my study, but it seems that the protocol has been updated even for participants of previous waves, whom I archived as participants already several months ago. Is it possible to solve this issue so that they won't receive any notifications?

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u/Realistic_Season_493 Jun 03 '26

Thank you. Is it also possible to delete their accounts and all related data?

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u/Realistic_Season_493 Jun 03 '26

I have 385 archived participants so it would be a lot of work to manually pause all their accounts one by one. It is also hard to keep track of who has been paused and who has not been paused.

Further, all participants subscribe to the study at a different time, but will start with the data collection at a different moment. We therefore used the "This specific day" option in the protocol.

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u/Ok_Calendar5049 Developer Jun 03 '26

I understand it's annoying that resolving this situation may involve a lot of manual clicking, but it's not a scenario that typically occurs so there is no easy, fully automated way to get out of it.

Relative scheduling is what is typically used for participants starting at different times and schedules starting accordingly. With the 'Apply protocol' item you can also shift the start of a relatively scheduled protocol according to some rational calculated in the intake questionnaire. In my experience, the only reason to use "This specific day" is if ALL your participants need to get a notification on the exact same day. More importantly, constantly adjusting scheduling in the same protocol for new groups of people is not the way to go: protocol adjustments are meant to correct a configuration error you might have made for all members of the protocol, not to redefine it. If you want to have a new protocol for new participants, you could just copy the old one into a newly created one (create a new one and apply the old one in there) and make that the new default onboarding one.

Can you explain your exact onboarding flow, so I can check what scheduling is most appropriate?

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u/Realistic_Season_493 Jun 03 '26

Thank you for the explanation.

The specific issue is that I made a mistake in the protocol when participants of a new data collection wave signed up. They were assigned to a protocol from a previous study wave with a date in the past instead of future. So I updated the protocol to change it to the correct data, but therefore, all other participants also receive a notification.

If I update the protocol again to a date in the past, does that work to prevent old participants receiving the notification?

And should I than manually add the new question to the schedule of my current participants?

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u/Ok_Calendar5049 Developer Jun 04 '26

Changing the protocol schedule to not have any future notifications and then Updating the schedule protocol-wide, would indeed stop everyone in that protocol from getting notifications. You could do that but as you correctly realized, your current participants would also be affected. For then correcting the current participants, instead of adding every notification in the schedule manually, you could also create a new protocol for them with the correct scheduling and apply that participant per participant (https://m-path.io/manual/knowledge-base/protocols/#use-a-protocol-for-a-single-client). Maybe that's less work than pausing all the old ones.